It's easy to glaze over the dance cards we found in the Memory Books. A largely plain booklet announcing and enumerating dances, stranger's names hastily rendered, perhaps a nod to other programming -- what gives?

A deeper look reveals so much more. 

History of Dance Cards

But, first -- some context: dance cards have been around since the 18th century. They are by no means unique to academic life or UVM community in the 1920s.

These small booklets enumerated and detailed each planned dance. Included were the names of any sponsoring organizations, the name of the event itself, its time, date, and location, and, for these kinds of collegiate affairs, names of chaperones.

The names of songs and their composers were also commonly incorporated -- which a live band or orchestra would have been contracted to play. The covers of the dance cards often included renderings of the venues or emblems of event sponsors (like, say, fraternities or sororities); sometimes they were plain text. Dance cards often included a decorative cord, intended for wear around the young lady's wrist or ball gown, as well as a small, attached pencil.

Dance cards gave structure and formality to the evening. By the 20th century, dance cards were generally disbursed to young women for the purpose of planning their dances with the young men in their social circle. A gentleman would request a certain dance; if she accepted, a lady would then pencil it into her card. Through his request, a young man revealed some of his intentions with the lady -- a waltz and a foxtrot carry different emotional valence. In having a dance "claimed," a young woman could garner the young men interested in partnering with her beyond the dance floor.

It allowed a young woman attending to plan out the night ahead of her. A full dance card -- one in which all the possible slots are spoken for -- allowed the lady in question to gently decline, especially unwanted propositions. (Yes, this is also where the expression "My dance card is full" originates.)

In our research beyond the UVM archives, we found one especially adorable dance card in which one same gentleman signed each blank slot:

And that isn't to say dance cards were always plain -- some were highly decorative, incorporating lace or embellished paper, even precious jewels and metals among the most elite. Some dispensed with paper altogether for fanciful silk or patterned metallic overlays. Some were amply creative -- paper fans upon whose struts dance participants penciled in their names.

Later on, and certainly as we found in Lovejoy's Memory Book, men were also the recipients of dance cards, with ladies penciling the dances they would like to claim on a given soiree.

It's Never That Simple

As material culture, they reveal plenty: who is dancing and with whom; what they are dancing and what they are not. When we take a farther step back, they draw attention to who was or was not included in the room.

Dance cards perpetuated traditional gender norms, while facilitating coupling between the college-going classes -- largely a white, Christian lot at the time.

It's no surprise they went out of style in the late 1950s, inching up to the Free Love that would come to typify the 1960s.

What UVM Students Likely Weren't Dancing

One Dance Card flouted the tribute "A Waltz to the Kickless Punch" -- this is a reference to the fact that we are in the Prohibition. Thus, at official campus functions or legal businesses, alcohol would not be served, only 'kickless punch.' Not surprisingly, the 1924 Junior Questionnaire reveals 18 of the 329 Seniors who cast a vote still admitted to drinking -- though only 2 votes were from women.

Scouring the Dance Cards in these Memory Books, we couldn't help but notice another absence. Only two types of dances were represented: the Foxtrot and the Waltz, though the Jazz Age is known for its broad repertoire.

Other dances popular at the time included the Can-Can, the Samba, the Charleston, the Shimmy, and the Black-Bottom Dance: dances that take root in African and Latin Dance. These tend to be more pelvic- or hip-centered or otherwise necessitating a closer degree of closeness to one's dance partner -- and thus seen as more risque at the time. It's interesting to think what fun the after parties, presuming there were any, might have been.

Despite their lack of representation here, there is a wide and deep range of dance styles that people learned and enjoyed. Things were not nearly as homogenized and white as the archives might look. Many dances were celebratory of all manner of physical experience, though they might not have passed muster with school chaperones and guardians... Delight in some samples of more dances in the videos below.

Besides social currency, dance cards served as souvenirs. Which is lucky for us -- because that's how they stumbled into the archives at UVM.

And for more dance cards, check out our post on social media! Links are below:

A few more fun dances we encountered along the way: